Top 10 Ted Talks about Music Every Musician Must Watch

I’ve probably watched hundreds of TED talks over the years but as a composer and a music teacher, a great talk about music can really make my day (if not my week!). I love sharing inspirational stuff with my students so here some of the best TED talks about music.

In no
particular order, here are my 10 favorite TED talks about music:

The Transformative Impact of Classical Musicby Benjamin Zander

Music and Emotion Through Timeby Michael Tilson Thomas

How Architecture Helped Music Evolveby David Byrne

The Unexpected Beauty of Everyday Soundsby Meklit Hadero

Releasing the Music in your Headby Tod Machover and Dan Ellsey

How Sampling Transformed Musicby Mark Ronson

The 4 Ways Sound Affects Us by Julian Treasure

The Voice of the Natural Worldby Bernie Krause

How I Found Myself Through Musicby Anika Paulson

The Mad Scientist of Music by Mark Applebaum

Let’s look at what we can learn from these talks, see what they’re about and read some notable quotes.

1. The Transformative Impact of Classical Music

Conductor and music director Benjamin Zander presents
us with a passionate talk about the positive effects that music can have in
people’s lives. Zander is an absolutely wonderful teacher and his love for
music is just infectious! This is by far one of my favourite talks about music
I’ve ever watched.

The Idea

A piece of music goes through a journey. Zander invites us to listen to his performance of Chopin’s Prelude in E minor and observe how it travels from ‘away’ to ‘home’.

Lessons Learned

Apart from teaching the audience to anticipate the
arrival on the tonic (the musical term for the note that feels like ‘home’), Zander proves that once they
know how to listen everyone can be moved by music. On his way of explaining
this, Zander sprinkles a few life lessons too.

Notable Quotes

“Everybody
has a fantastic ear!”

“Here is a B.
The next note is a C. And the job of the B is to make the C sad.”

“This is
about vision. This is about the long line, like the bird who flies over the
field and doesn’t care about the fences underneath.”

2. Music and Emotion Through Time

Michael Tilson Thomas is a pianist, conductor and
composer. In this talk, Thomas takes us on a brief journey through music
history to show us how music, and its purpose, transformed over time.

The Idea

Over the course of its history, music changed to
reflect its culture. Music developed through the invention of new tools and
technologies, such as notation, printing and recording.

Lessons Learned

The objectives for composers were different in
different eras: from praising God to imitating the majesty of the night sky to expressing
the emotions of mankind, the purpose of music changes with its culture.

As the purpose of music changes, so does the music
itself. Music has evolved from Gregorian chant to complex harmony and other
developments to fulfil its purpose for the time.

People’s attitude towards music is also changing
through the ages.

Notable Quotes

“Classical
music is an unbroken living tradition that goes back over a 1000 years and
every one of those years has had something unique and powerful to say to us
about what’s it like to be alive.”

“The
improviser senses and plays the next cool move but a composer is considering
all possible moves, testing them out, prioritising them out until he sees how
they can form a powerful and coherent design of ultimate and enduring
coolness.”

3. How Architecture Helped Music Evolve

David Byrne is a songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and
the founder of the band ‘Talking Heads’
who released 8 studio albums in the span of 16 years.

The Idea

A fascinating look at how musical styles are
intimately connected with the venues they are intended for. From outdoors
African drumming to Gregorian chant, from classical orchestras to jazz bands,
from car stereos to mp3 players, David Byrne explores how the location (or
device) where music is played, influences the genre itself.

Lessons Learned

Music is influenced by the culture
that it is part of. And this includes even the venues in which it’s performed.

Musicians, composers and songwriters
have been adapting to their environment in fascinating and intricate ways.

Birds adapt their ‘music’ too. Their
whistling, chirping or singing varies depending on their habitat as well as how
high or low they tend to fly.

Notable Quotes

“At
one point music diverged. There’s live music and there’s recorded music and
they no longer have to be exactly the same.”

“This
is a reverse view of things from the romantic view that first comes the passion
and then the outpouring of emotion – and then somehow it gets shaped into
something.”

4. The Unexpected Beauty of Everyday Sounds

Meklit Hadero is a singer-songwriter
known for her unique style of combining jazz, folk and eastern African music in
her songs.

The Idea

Inspiration for new music can be found everywhere: in nature, in language and even in silence.

Lessons Learned

Musical ideas can be found everywhere
if we listen openly and closely. There is a lot of melody in birdsongs and
animal sounds. In everyday words and phrases there is a clear melody as well as
rhythm. All these can be inspiration for musical material that can be explored
and developed further.

Notable Quotes

“The
everyday soundscape can be the most unexpected inspiration for songwriting.”

“A
healthy environment has animals and insects taking up low, medium and high
frequency bands in exactly the same way as the symphony (orchestra) does.”

“The
world is alive with musical expression. We are already immersed.”

5. Releasing the Music in your Head

Tod Machover’s work at MIT’s media
lab experiments with bringing new technologies that encourage and enable people
from all walks of life to create new music. The ideas for HyperScore and Guitar Hero
came out of this lab.

Dan Ellsey, a man with cerebral palsy,
joins this talk to perform his instrumental piece “My Eagle Song” thanks to a piece of technology designed
specifically for him.

The Idea

Making music is not just fun – it can also be healing of many mental states, conditions and diseases. With the right tools and technology, everyone is capable of expressing themselves through music and experience a new life.

Lessons Learned

Making music is literally for
everyone! Given the right support, absolutely anyone can be a creator and that
can be greatly beneficial to the individual.

Music is great to listen to, but it’s
even more powerful when you make it yourself.

The right technologies can help
absolutely anyone express themselves in music. Perhaps, one way forward in our
ever-growing, high-tech culture is to find ways of developing ‘personal
instruments’ – helping people create music with technologies that are adapted
to their specific physical and/or mental needs.

Notable Quotes

“Music
is fun but it’s also transformative. Music can change your life more than
almost anything. It can change the way you communicate with others, it can
change your body, it can change your mind.”

“Everybody
can experience music in a profound way. We just have to make different tools.”

“Music,
paradoxically even more than words, is one of the very best ways we have of
showing who we really are.”

6. How Sampling Transformed Music

Mark Ronson is a DJ, songwriter and record producer who has topped the charts working with big names such as Bruno Mars, Adele and Amy Winehouse.

The Idea

Sampling opened up a whole new world of possibilities – not because DJs and producers are lazy, but because they could take something familiar, make it their own, and share it back to the world in a new form.

Lessons Learned

The 1984 song “La di da di” by Slick Rick and Doug E. Fresh is one of the most sampled songs of all time. Various parts of it have been sampled over 500 times in all sorts of different songs, yet none of them are mere copies of the original.

Just like composers of the past
learned and built on each other’s creations, so do modern songwriters and
producers borrow ideas and make them their own. Music has always developed in
this way.

Sampling can be, and often is, done
tastefully. Treating all of sampling as lazy and unoriginal is unfair and
close-minded. Every song should be judged based on its own merits.

Notable Quotes

“They
were sampling those records because they heard something that spoke to them and
they instantly wanted to inject themselves into the narrative of that music. They
heard it, they wanted to be a part of it and all of a sudden they found
themselves in possession of the technology to do so.”

“In
music we take something that we love and we build on it.”

“I
can’t help it. I take things that I love and I mess around with them.”

7. The 4 Ways Sound Affects Us

Julian Treasure trains people to listen
and communicate more effectively by becoming aware of the sound around them. In
this short talk, he presents to us the 4 ways that sound has a profound impact
on us.

The Idea

Sound affects us physiologically, psychologically, cognitively and behaviourally. It’s a major force in our life whether we know it or not.

Lessons Learned

Our minds and our bodies are deeply
connected to the sounds of our environment. Sounds can affect our hormones (such
as cortisol alerting us to dangers), our breathing patterns (calm or rushed), our
emotional states (positive or negative), our health and many other countless
ways.

If we take control of the sound
around us, we can improve our health and our general well-being.

Notable Quotes

“Music
is not the only sound that can affect your emotions. Natural sound can do that
too. Birdsong, for example, is a sound that most people find reassuring. There’s
a reason for that: over hundreds of thousands of years we’ve learned that when
the birds are singing, things are safe.”

“Music
is the most powerful sound there is. It’s powerful for two reasons: you
recognize it fast and you associate it very powerfully.”

8. The Voice of the Natural World

Bernie Krause is a musician and a
‘soundscape ecologist’. In this talk, he brings us some wonderful recordings of
the sounds of the nature, which he has been collecting for over 4 decades. Without
even mentioning music, his insights into the sounds of the natural world are
really inspiring for musicians and music makers.

The Idea

Listening to the sounds of the natural world helps us understand it far more than anything else.

Lessons learned

A soundscape (the overall sound of
any given place) consists of 3 layers of sound:

Geophony:
the sounds of inanimate, non-living objects in nature like wind and ocean
waves;

Biophony:
the sounds of living things most notably animals.

Anthrophony:
the sounds that human beings make: some of it is controlled (like music) while some
is chaotic and incoherent (noise).

By listening carefully to the sounds
of a habitat, we can see how healthy it is. Much like music, the spectrum of
sound should encompass a variety of frequencies.

Notable quotes

“Environmental
sciences have typically tried to understand the world from what we see but a
much fuller understanding can begotten from what we hear.”

“While
a picture is worth a thousand words, a soundscape is worth a thousand
pictures.”

9. How I Found Myself Through Music

Anika Paulson takes us through a
personal reflection of her experiences in music. Like many of us musicians,
songwriters and composers, she feels a special connection to anything that is
related to music. This connection, she says, is a major part of her identity.

The Idea

Music is everywhere and it is in everything. For Anika, it is a significant part of who she is and how she lives.

Lessons learned

Music is a reflection of our lives:
where music has rhythm, we have routines. Where music has harmony, we have
friends and family. Where music has melody, we have ourselves riding on top.

As we create music, music helps
create us. It becomes who we are and how we engage with the world.

Notable quote

“We
had basic two- to four-measure lines and yet each of them almost told a story,
like they had so much potential.”

“Music
is my way of coping with the changes in my life. There’s a beautiful connection
between music and life. It can bind us to reality and at the same time, it
allows us to escape it.”

10. The Mad Scientist of Music

With his unique curiosity and
inventiveness Mark Applebaum writes wonderfully-weird music. In this TED talk,
he shares with us his music for an instrument that he created himself, music
for conductors without performers, a Concerto for florist and orchestra, and
other new and strange musical ideas.

Applebaum is not just a composer or
just an inventor – he plays both roles (and many others) at the same time! He’s a ‘composer-inventor’
and he brings us a glimpse of his creative world in this fascinating
presentation.

The Idea

Mark Applebaum shows us how being bored with ‘normal’ music drove him to be creative in fantastic new ways. Boredom, he says, pushed him to take on roles that go beyond the traditional, narrow definitions of a composer.

Lessons Learned

We should question not just what
music is, but perhaps also, what music can be.

Questioning old conventions can take
you in new, wonderful (and sometimes weird) directions you wouldn’t have
discovered otherwise.

Try new things in your art and see
what happens!

Notable quotes

“Is
it music? I decided ultimately that this is the wrong question and that this is
not the important question. The important question is: ‘Is it interesting?’ and
I follow this question not worrying ‘is it music?’ and not worrying about the
definition of the thing that I’m making.”

“I allow my creativity to push me in directions that are simply interesting to me and I don’t worry about the likeness of the result to some notion – some paradigm, of what music composition is supposed to be.”